Miller Livestock

It’s been a while since I’ve written in this blog, but there is a good reason.

I had a friend named Donny Taylor who designed this website for us with his wife Molly. This blog was one of his ideas. I wrote the first one, he wrote the next two. When he approached me about a blog I was quite hesitant as I was not sure if I had the discipline nor the patience to do this every month – but he assured me it would get done. Donny was a good friend and one of the few people that truly understood my mission with food. We were taking photos at Miller Livestock one day. The next thing I knew, Aaron Miller put Donny in the middle of a pasture with some cattle. Aaron and I remember taking this photo vividly. You need to know that Donny was not a farmer, but more of a city-boy. Every time Aaron sees it he shakes his head. We laugh thinking about how calm, yet nervous Donny was. There is a steer in this picture that Donny was not too fond of, but I feel that moment; making eye contact with this steer, through the camera, was Donny’s AHA moment!

As I’m making my annual biweekly trip to Kinsman, Ohio this morning, I started reminiscing and thinking how far we have come with the farm to table movement. Sometime in the winter/spring of 2011 I met a guy named Kip Amerin who raised laying hens and meat chickens in Andover. Kip was our very first farmer that we bought directly from and we had an agreement to buy some eggs and meat chickens in the summer when they came to size.